Hey all, Hadoop World is just a little under a month away, so I wanted to start a thread regarding planning for our next release. There's obviously no rule that we must release anything for Hadoop World, but we had originally hoped to ship 0.90 (or at least have it in a usable release candidate state) for the conference. Lining releases up around conferences is a good way to build buzz, etc.
To summarize the state of the world right now, we have basically two main trees: (a) 0.89.20100830 in release candidates, and (b) trunk which includes the master rewrite branch merged. Currently, 0.89.20100830 is pretty good looking and Stumble is using it in production modulo a few changes. Trunk is a bit messy, as it's failing its tests and apparently won't even start up a cluster. It's certainly not in a releasable state right now, and it remains to be seen how much more work we need to put into it to get it to be stable. So, I think we have basically three choices: 1) Continue to work on stabilizing trunk, and aim to get it usable enough to do a developer release for Hadoop World, still under the umbrella of the 0.89 series. Assumedly this release would be *less* stable than 0.89.20100830 given the scope of the changes and the amount of time we have remaining to test and fix, so calling it 0.90 at that point is probably unwise. 2) Add a few more patches to 0.89.20100830 to fix up some current issues (assignment speed, read optimizations, et al), and rebrand it as 0.90. In parallel we continue to work on trunk and start doing developer releases called 0.91.* including all the master rewrite. Then when the master rewrite is ready, we'll release that as 0.92. 3) We can completely ignore Hadoop World - it's a nice place to make a release, but we can always miss the date by a month if we prefer. I'm personally leaning towards option 2 above - there are a ton of great fixes and features since 0.20, and getting them out to a broader user community sooner rather than later seems prudent. We can then take our time to fix up and stabilize trunk and get an 0.92 out with all the goodness when it's ready. Thoughts? -Todd -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
